When the High Court of Australia gets it right, judgments read like the electric lyrics of songs of freedom. When I read Daniel Glenn Fitzgerald v Regina, published this month by the Full High Court (without Chief Justice French, who is normally the voice of democratic reason and the natural leader of civil and human rights on the court), I almost levitated.

The five judges wrote a unanimous decision that swept aside prejudice and irrational thinking. I wanted to break into song, "We shall overcome, We shall overcome, One day!" The Fitzgerald judgment indeed reads like a freedom song. It's a cry in the form of a shout out for the best attributes that our supreme court, the High Court, should bring to the jurisprudence in our body politic. At this time, in contrast, parliament has been responsible for legislation that reads like the obituaries for civil rights and the vitality of real political life in this country. Parliament looks like karaoke night in a bad hotel.

The High Court in two recent cases has brought true leadership to this country's jurisprudence. The great constitutional device of life tenure means the High Court, in implementing the true letter and spirit of the law, can make unpopular decisions and not kowtow to the mob with three-word slogans. It does not have to follow the tabloid/talkback DJ hymn sheet to stay popular, or get consistent good polls to get elected every three or four years.

In decisions like Mabo, asserting ancient Aboriginal land rights, dismissing the legal notions that there was no law, no rule of law, no inhabitants, no history, no real people before white men from Great Britain dropped off boatloads of our First Fleet prisoners and wardens to serve their sentences in this Great Southern Land. Australia was invaded and occupied by Imperial England using prisoners as soldiers and wardens as officers. The High Court in Mabo, gave Australia a true national dignity and a place at the table of civilised countries.

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The High Court is the conductor of an orchestra of courts, spread across the country, with supreme courts and appellate courts in each state that must be occasionally told that their decisions on important life and law questions are wrong. The Supreme Courts have given decisions down to the minor players of the orchestra in the District and Local courts of the land, who must play the music as dictated by the baton held by the state Supreme courts.

In Fitzgerald v Regina, the High Court overturned the South Australia Court of Criminal Appeals decision, on a very important legal, logical and jurisprudential approach to the significance of DNA evidence and its real place in the courtroom.

Fitzgerald v Regina not only found the lower courts including the Supreme Court but also the jury and the judge got it wrong, in understanding the place of DNA in the trial. They immediately acquitted Fitzgerald of murder and another charge. The High Court reminded lawyers and prosecutors of Australia not to be overwhelmed by the science of DNA. All too often, juries, judges and prosecutors have used DNA and scientific evidence to seduce juries, bewitched by CSI shows, and the false certainty it seemingly brings.

Fitzgerald reminds us that you don't leave reason, rationality, common sense and fairness outside the court, in the hallway or in the foyer.

The Crown case alleged that Fitzgerald's DNA on a didgeridoo, with apparent bloodstains of the deceased's DNA, proved that he was one of the intruder murderers. As it turns out, the didgeridoo might have been brought onto the crime scene and could have had the accused's, Fitzgerald's DNA on it, before the murder, or it could have been transferred by somebody else with whom Fitzgerald had been in direct contact. The Crown had not disproved these facts, raised as alternate hypotheses, and accordingly the High Court disregarded the suspicion and implemented the law.

The High Court blew out the bull dust and saw dust that prosecutors have been introducing into the witness box, by clothing their witnesses in white coats, like experts plucked from the science lab, to bring the veneer of authority, of scientific qualifications and of a false certainty and gleam that the real facts do not possess.

In Anthony Charles Honeysett v Queen, the Crown followed its recent practice of calling a so-called expert witness to 'extreme makeover' ordinary evidence caught on CCTV. The so-called expert testifies by comparing the figure in the footage with the accused to nail him. A popular choice of prosecutors is Professor Maciej Henneberg, a Professor of Anatomy and Biological Anthropology at University of Adelaide. Highly respected in academic circles, but who has been used to interpret the figures in hooded disguises in CCTV images with the accused in the dock.

The High Court called upon common sense to assert an end to this shell game of using big scientific terms to impress juries whose everyday experience can compare one photograph or set of images with the accused, together with forensic photographs taken of him under compulsory procedures.

The experts have been using anatomical language to describe obvious characteristics of a suspect's body, skinny persons are described by Prof Henneberg as 'ectomorphic body types', 'oval shaped heads' rather than round, isolating obvious characteristics such as right handed and skin tones as significant. The expert uses a grid of dissimilarities and similarities that tend to obscure the task of true identification in scientific language. The spade is a spade even if its skin tone is darker than white. Short of true expertise and evidence like dental record comparisons, the High Court in Honeysett brushed off the bull dust of scientific jargon used by Crown experts that might dignify a finger and call it a 'digit'.

The jury has all the experience to compare one body with another, even if the body is wearing a balaclava with eye slits, shows a tattoo on his forearm or is tall as a jockey or an NBA basketballer. We don't need professors in white coats and stethoscopes to tell the difference.

In recent digital times, much crime is captured on Orwellian CCTV images almost everywhere. Every forensic advance creates an economic opportunity to fill the available vacuum. Human nature abhors a vacuum where money can be made. Professor Henneberg, undoubted expert in anatomy and biological anthropology, is no more an expert witness of CCTV than an eye witness, or layman, or juror. The pictures speak for themselves.

The High Court is not only a breath of fresh air, it is the wind beneath us when it writes songs.